Donny Davis on Coho salmon in Hayden Creek, January 3, 2012

DONNY DAVIS: This January 3rd, I think. My name is Donny Davis. I've lived on Hayden Creek here since the late seventies and, uh, oh, I grew up my earlier spent here in the Alsea Valley and then moved over to Philomath but have fished here since I was just a tyke. I used to follow my dad around. He used to fish Clemens Park before it was a park. There were old car bodies and lawn stringers where they used to cross the river there. And so I grew up fishing on the river, and this fish, Fall Creek, back when it was full of Coho, spent a lot of time down there. And when I first moved up here, the place we bought originally was part of the Hayden donation land claim and, uh, some of the first settlers, his descendants, are who we bought our place from. And we have 50 acres downstream here. But I talked to one of the sisters of the Hayden brothers, and her name was Myrtle Taylor, and she told me when she was in grade school, there used to be a grade school just above the highway down by the creek here. And she told me on the recess, they used to go down to Hayden Creek and harass the salmon, said that the creek was just full of salmon. Well, I lived here for several years and I never did see any salmon in the creek, and I got to wondering why, so I kind of got to looking into it and I read some articles on wood placement, one thing led to another, and I thought, well, maybe there's not enough water in the creek where there isn't salmon.

So in, I think it was '97, we started a project and we put some wood structures in the creek with horses and a year or so later the highway department, they restructured the culvert down there for enhancing fish to get through there. And after that I faithfully walked the creek and I didn't see any evidence of any fish use up here. So I contacted Cody at F and W to see about maybe getting fish restock. Well, the first couple of years I didn't have much success. They thought, well, we fixed the creek, they'll show up on their own. Well, I said, what can we do to jump stop, or jump-start this, and I suggested use some hatch boxes and one thing led to another. And after a couple of years we tried planting some juvenile fish that had been produced elsewhere and transferred them to Hayden Creek. And we only put about 100 in here two different years. And at the time I told them I didn't think that was, had much chance of being successful. And finally they agreed with me, and they agreed to transplant six pairs of adult Coho from the North Fork Hatchery.

And so in 2002, we started that program, and for three years in a row we transplanted six, six pairs of Coho right at the bottom of this culvert. And after three years, we didn't we didn't put any more fish up here. We just waited to see what came back. And the first year -- I have to check my cheat sheet here, but from the original six planted in '02 and in '05, I had 32 adult Coho and one Jack Salmon return. And every year since then I've had 15 one year, one year I wasn't here, but I could see the Reds. In '08 there was 45 adults, three jacks, and I think this year is their progeny returned. And yesterday I walked a creek and I counted 60 adult Coho and three jacks. So just about every year they seem to increase a few more and so this year there happened to be 11 of them got through the culvert here. Which, this particular culvert has quite a drop at the bottom end. And it's kind of a challenge for them to get through there. But yet, one thing about Coho, they're pretty persistent. And I continue to be amazed at how resilient they are and how determined, and how little water it takes for them to spawn. In this particular creek. You can step across it for, well, it's about a mile down to the Alsea River and the majority of it you can step across. But yet the salmon continue to use it and it seems to be a great piece of habitat for them.

Typically, when Coho come back through a stream like that, they seem to favor a pool where it shallows out and then they work their way upstream and continually work the gravel back as they lay their eggs to keep working gravel up. The female especially, will kind of pump with their tail and lift the gravel up to where it covers their eggs and they'll kind of work their way forward through a hole like that and keep laying the legs or the eggs in there and then just kind of lay a layer of eggs and cover the grass, the gravel back over them. But in such a small stream like this, they really do a lot of reorganization of the gravel as they kind of excavate their way up through these pools. But every year there's places I think they should spawn that they don't. And there's places that doesn't look like a very good place and they'll just turn everything on in. But I've learned a lot just by watching them and it's really pretty fascinating what they do. But this creek is typical of a lot of small streams in the, in the coast. That there doesn't look like a lot just looking at it, but you take a fish that size to come up here and spawn a lot of places. Like up in Alaska, the bears, they'll walk along the creeks and eat the fish and up here the bear don't seem to bother them that much, but occasionally a raccoon will come along and nab one. Birds will pick them off occasionally. Eagles, a lot of times, will frequent a salmon spawning stream and can feed on either live ones or dead ones, but they're pretty vulnerable when they get up this high.

This year we had real low water conditions. We had a lot of rain early on in October, but then December was on track to be the driest December on record until I think it was the 28th it started to rain. And we had a couple inches of rain overnight. So I walked down to the mouth of the creek where it hits the Alsea and there's a fairly good rock shelf as Hayden Creek dumps into the main creek there. And it's kind of a struggle for the salmon to get over. But that particular day, the water level that came up in the main river and there's about a one-foot drop there and I got down there about an hour before dark and I counted nine adult Coho come surging up out of the Alsea into the creek. And it was kind of gratifying for me. It's kind of like I take a firsthand interest in this creek, so it's kind of like my kids coming home for Christmas when I see them coming up the creeks. I always look forward to them coming back and seeing how many and see if the run's increasing any over the previous years and being a small stream like this, it takes a while to walk it. But I can get a pretty accurate count on how many adults return every year. Although we have added some logs into the creek to enhance the habitat. And one thing I've learned is these fish are really good about hiding under structure. They will burrow in under undercut banks and roots, and they're really good at hiding. If they happen to come in and they're not ripe, ready to spawn, they'll hide out under structure for however many days it takes to where they're ready to start spawning. But this year they were trapped down in the main stream for so long, when they got up here, they were ripe, ready to go and they started spawning almost immediately. And this, about five days along, they're almost done spawning already. They're pretty kind of winding down.

But this group here still is fairly active, and I know down below there's several reds. [?] Kind of the net they scoop out is called a red. And I think I counted 20, 28 reds between the mouth of the crack down below and up here and down below quite a few of the reds. There's just a female on the red. There's no males working actively, but the females seem to hang around and continually work the gravel to bury their eggs deeper in the gravel. But it's been a really active year and we might get a bit more of the next high water flow. Time will tell. Yeah, it's kind of funny when the males get to battling. I always thought it'd be interesting to get a really small camera and run it right up in alongside them as they're spawning and see what it looks like underwater. In this particular location, this was probably a long culvert at one time where they just pushed logs in the creek and pushed dirt over the top. And then later on, I think when Starker came in here, they placed a culvert on top of some of the existing logs. And there used to be a cedar log that extended out below the bottom of the culvert and it prevented fish from getting a straight shot to jump into the culvert. So I talked to Gary Blanchard from Starker Forest, got permission to cut that off to give him a better shot. And that is actually part of the log laying at the base of this pool. And it jammed the creek up in and raised the elevation of the water to where it's not such a long jump to get up into the culvert.

But anyway, this gene pool allows the fish to get their momentum up, to get a shot at jumping up into the culvert. And this year, I counted 11 adults that made it up through here. And we've talked about this culvert over the years, whether it was worth replacing or not. But there's only about 150 yards of habitat above this. And then there's a big waterfalls that the fish can't get beyond. So it's really not justified to spend the money to replace that. To me, one of the interesting things about this crack is the kind of the diverse habitats. The lower third is owned by Bud Stout, which all farm ground, and that's the peace between the highway and the river, probably a short half mile. And then our ownership extends up the creek about a quarter of a mile. And Russ Colgan from Salem owns the other piece. But the upper end here, probably approximately a half mile, is owned by Starker Forest. And there's a lot of evidence of the old growth logging. There's stumps along the edge of the creek here that have springboard holes and the diameters on them are a lot of them, five, six foot. So I'm probably bigger than that. But back when this was logged, typically they take a bite or maybe a second cut and the rough or tops was left behind. And down the creek there's several places where there's big, big wood across the creek and places where it almost damns a creek up. But it's, there's a lot of structure in the creek due to the ancient logging practices where they did leave the big wood behind. And a lot of times that'll make the rock kind of gather up and the fish seem to utilize that quite a bit. But I don't know, these trees here, probably 55, 60 years old second growth now and a lot of hard wood mixture in there. Back when this was originally logged, they didn't have any buffer strips. They logged right down to the creek. And present logging practices are required to leave a buffer strip on both sides whenever it's logged.

Yeah, I mentioned earlier when we was up by the culvert that the Hayden Creek is a pretty diverse piece of habitat and there's basically three different ownerships and Bud Stout owns the piece, we're looking at it from the south. We're up on the ridge across the river from our place. But I mentioned Bud Stout's ground was farmland. He owns the piece from the river up to the highway, and he's ran cattle and sheep in the Hayden's that homesteaded, originally they, they farmed, they had cattle and actually our place was a farm originally also. But Bud's land has been turned into Christmas tree production and then our place has kind of reverted back to mostly forest land and then Starker's piece up above has always been in the forestry, in the forest production, but above the highway, our place, the creek is mostly hardwood and then up on Starker's it turns into more scattered, bigger fir and hardwood mixture, a lot of maple and alder mix. From this vantage point, we have a view of the, pretty much the entire Hayden Creek drainage and approximately 600 acres, I'd guess. But as far as salmon production, it's one of the most productive stretches per mile as any in the entire Alsea basin. So one thing I'm kind of proud of going from zero here just a few years ago, planted a few fish, and now it seems to be very productive.